Why the gov't source leaked PRISM

6/6/13 6:28 PM EDT

The Washington Post has published a remarkable report showing that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been monitoring the central servers of major Internet companies -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple -- and "extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."

Why did a government source leak information of this program, dubbed "PRISM," to the Post? What follows is perhaps the most chilling paragraph I've read to date about U.S. government surveillance:

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

In the wake of last night's Guardian report about the NSA's collection of Verizon phone user metadata, the New York Times editorial board argued that the Obama administration "has now lost all credibility" in defending its abuses of executive power. That was before the report about PRISM, which unlike the Verizon metadata, includes surveillance of user content.

“'They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,' the officer said."